China's metro explosion: lessons from Chinas big four cities

No country in recent years has been more active building more metro lines in more cities than China. With only six metro lines in service in four cities in 2000, China accounted for just 3.7 percent of the world's metro lines and less than four percent of its metro system length. Twenty years later, with 214 metro lines operating in 41 cities, China accounts for thirty percent of the world's metro lines and 23.9 percent of its metro system length. With metro ridership in China's four top-tier cities- Beijing Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen - currently accounting for nearly 60 percent of metro passengers nationwide, what lessons do they offer about the dos and don'ts planning, building, financing, and operating new metro systems? In terms of gaining and maintaining political support, all four cities benefitted from the Chinese government's 2006 issuance of its "Public Transportation Priority" policy document, which identified building new metro systems as a national urban development priority, established national rolling stock and signaling procurement standards and practices, and set clear expectations regarding the leading role local officials, especially mayors, should take in implementing the policy. In terms of system design and planning, the overriding lesson is that standardizing route configurations and station placement practices across an entire metro system yields economies of scale benefits in terms of reducing planning and construction costs (and construction times as well), but also has significant drawbacks in terms of not being able to match metro service characteristic to the land use and economic geography conditions of individual cities. Compared to Beijing, which has taken a more extreme approach to standardizing its metro line and station siting practices, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen have each devoted greater effort toward matching the locations of their metro lines and stations to ground-level land uses and densities. This has enabled them to substantially out-perform Beijing in terms of metro ridership per kilometer of line length and square kilometer of urbanized land.